“If it catched me I was a goner just as sure as if run down by a steam-engine. But you would think thar couldn’t be any chance of it catchin’ me, ’cause it war gravertation that was pullin’ us both, and one oughter go as fast as t’other. The only thing I had to do was to keep my feet and stay in the middle of the gorge. If I catched one of my toes in the snow crust I would tumble, and before I could help myself the avalanche would squelch me.
“I can never forget, but I can’t tell how I felt goin’ down that three-quarters of a mile like a cannon ball. The wind cut my face as if it war a harrycane, and everything was so misty like I couldn’t see anything plain, and so I war in mortal fear of turnin’ out of the course and hittin’ the side of the gulch.
“I don’t know how it war, but once I felt myself goin’ over. I s’pose I must have got out of line and tried to get back without exactly knowin’ what I war doin’. Kit Carson, who war watchin’ me, said I went two hundred feet balanced on one snow-shoe. He then give me up, for he war sure thar warn’t a shadder of a chance for me.
“But I swung back agin, and, keepin’ to the middle of the gulch, soon struck the level, and went skimmin’ away as fast as ever till I begun goin’ up the incline on t’other side. I war doin’ that in fine style when the p’int of one of my shoes dipped under the snow crust, and I know I turned a round dozen summersets before I stopped. It sort of mixed things in my brain, but the snow saved me from gettin’ hurt, and though the avalanche come powerful close, it didn’t quite reach me, and I won my beaver skin.”
CHAPTER XXV.
THE RANCH.
EPH BOZEMAN was so familiar with the Pecos River, from its source in the Rocky Mountains to its junction with the Rio Grande, that he conducted his friends to a fording place, where it was crossed without any of them wetting their feet. Riding up the opposite bank, they started across the comparatively level country, and by the middle of the afternoon struck a piece of grazing ground, which the hunters told him belonged to the ranch that the banker, Mr. Lord, had sent Strubell and Lattin to inspect.
The lands were so extensive that there were many portions from which not the first glimpse could be gained of the adobe structure that was erected nearly a half century before.